“I’m not afraid—­how dare you say so?”

“Oh, my pretty, how foolish we are, both of us!  I’d work my fingers to the bone for you, Molly, I’d lie down and let your little feet walk over me if they wanted to—­I’d shed my life’s blood for you, day by day, if it could help you.”

“Every one of you say this in the beginning, but it isn’t true in the end,” she answered.

“Not true—­not true?  Prove it.  Why do you think I’ve struggled and raised myself except to keep equal with you?  Why did I go to school and teach myself and make money enough to take classes in Applegate?  Just for you.  All those winter afternoons when I drove over there to learn things, I was thinking of you.  Do you remember that when you were at school in Applegate, you’d tell me the names of the books you read so that I might get them?”

“Don’t,” she cried fiercely, “don’t tell me those things, for I’ll never believe them!  I’m hard and bitter inside, there’s no softness in me.  If I went on my knees and prayed to love, I couldn’t do it.  Oh, Abel, there isn’t any love in my heart!”

“Do you remember when you kissed me?”

“No, I have forgotten.”

“It was only three weeks ago.”

“Yes, that was three weeks ago.”

The light died slowly out of his eyes as he looked at her.

“When you speak like that I begin to wonder if any good can ever come to us,” he returned.  “I’ve gone on breaking my heart over you ever since you were a little girl in short dresses, and I can’t remember that I’ve ever had anything but misery from you in my life.  It’s damnable the things I’ve stood and yet I’ve always forgotten them afterwards, and remembered only the times you were soft and gentle and had ceased to be shrewish.  Nobody on earth can be softer than you, Molly, when you want to, and it’s your softness, after all, that has held me in spite of your treatment.  Why, your mouth was like a flower when I kissed you, and parted and clung to me—–­”

“I wish you wouldn’t talk about it.  I hate to hear such things after they are over.”

“Such things!” He stood flicking hopelessly with a small branch he carried at the carrot flowers in the field.  “If you will tell me honestly that you were playing with me, Molly, I’ll give you up this minute,” he said.

The colour was high in her face and she did not look at him.

“I was playing with you, and I told you so the day afterwards,” she replied.

“Yes, but you didn’t mean it.  I can’t go any further because this is Mr. Jonathan’s land.”

His eyes had in them the hurt reproachful look of a wounded dog’s, and his voice trembled a little.

“I meant always—­always to lead you on until I could hurt you—­as I did the others—­and then throw you over.”

“And now that you can hurt me, you throw me over?” he asked.

Without speaking, she held out her hand for the basket, which he was about to fling from him.